[Temperature Check] Create the Uniswap Foundation

  • Full-time well-compensated team: UGP v0.1 was able to pay its small group of contributors part-time (≤30 hours per week). With an entity and full budget, the UF will be able to hire a full-time and well-compensated team. We also want to recognize the fact that a few UGP team members would still work 40+ hour weeks and weekends, uncompensated, due to a love for this work!

If I recall correctly from the initial UGP v.01 and renewal. The lead (you) is/was compensated 25/uni per hour ($360k a year at average sell price of $15), while the other members were compensated $150 a hour; 216k a year (both max capped at 30 hours per week).

Would these pay rates be increasing under the Uniswap Foundation?

Also, with the Uniswap foundation would a more official and regularly updated website be formed (not dependent on notion)? A quick look at the UGP page it only has wave 5 (current application is asking for wave 9?)

What is your stance on an oversight committee as part of the foundation? Or atleast making it easier to see how funds are moved to recipients (i.e. when list of awarded wave recipients is announced and posted, a link on each award amount to an etherscan movement of funds, so the community can see the actions of the funding.)

I highly doubt anyone in the UGP team was being compensated either 360k or 216k a year…

Cameron, on behalf of ConsenSys.

Establishing the Uniswap Foundation is a logical (and long overdue) step forward for the protocol and community. The proposal is led by some of Uniswap Labs’ best – Devin & Ken.

As broken out above in the proposal, capital allocation is within reason. Foundation funding of this size does require active management, reporting, and reassessment. We also believe the team understands and is capable of this.

Transparency & objectivity will be key factors for success.
We are excited to help and support the foundation in any way possible!

C

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Hey everyone!

@devinwalsh will join us for the Uniswap Community Call this Wednesday (August 10th) at 16:00 EST. Community call will be held in the Uniswap Discord.

event link: Uniswap

If someone can’t make it to the call but has something you would like to get more info, please send me questions via DM. Notes from the call will be shared after the call.

Looking forward on having a great discussion about this proposal!

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Those number’s are straight from the compensation outlay’s of the UGP .01v and renewal forum discussions here:

https://gov.uniswap.org/t/rfc-uniswap-grants-program-v0-1/9081

We propose the lead be compensated 25 UNI/hr (approximately $100 USD at time of this writing) capped at 30 hours/week. This compensation, along with the quarterly budget, will be allocated to the UGP multisig from the UNI treasury . In keeping with the committee’s commitment to the community, hours and duties will be logged publicly and transparently .

https://gov.uniswap.org/t/temperature-check-reinstating-ugp-v0-2-with-existing-funds/13310

  • Extend the UNI Grants Program for an additional 6 months
  • Utilizing the remaining funds, scaling the grants program up to $8.5M in grants
  • All committee members to be compensated at $150USD/hr as needed for no more than 30 hours/week
  • Due to time constraints, Robert Leshner, Kain Warwick, and Ashleigh Schap are stepping down from the committee, to be replaced by John Palmer, Ariana Fowler, and Callil Capuozzo

I do think the compensation numbers are resonable if these were full time individuals working for the future foundation.

It is very likey that the member’s did not max out hours every week, so I understand your doubtfulness of the annualized number’s ($150/h x 30 a week x 4 weeks x 12 months) I gave.

I am supportive of this foundation proposal. As setting up an offical company would increase the amount of transparency in reporting requirements.

To the forum - in full transparency, Michael and I had a follow up conversation late last week about his experience with UGP. Although we’re saddened that Michael did not have a good UGP experience, we still do genuinely appreciate receiving such honest feedback on our processes. We plan to keep improving as UGP matures under the UF.

Thanks for the questions @naught, adding some clarifying details below.

I was compensated at 25 UNI/hr for the first 6 months with UNI at $4. After the first 6 months, my compensation, as well as all other contributor’s, was updated to $150/hr (reconciled in UNI) with a cap of 30 hours per week. This was market rate for Grants contributors at the time. You’re correct that at this rate, my annualized salary is $216k. (One note I’ll add though is that because of the UNI price decline over the past few months, I have deferred pay in order to ensure UGP could continue funding grants.)

Regarding other UGP multisig signers: these 5 individuals were cumulatively paid $20k for their efforts over the past 1.5 years (at $150 per hour, with some choosing not to be paid).

Regarding Grants subcommittee members: these members are compensated at $150/hour or less by the subcommittees they work for, based on appropriate market rates.

The UF, as a legal entity, will aim to offer competitive full-time compensation packages including fiat salary, health care benefits, and long-term vested UNI to our employees. Being able to offer full-time work with competitive packages will open up our talent pipeline considerably, and allow us to build the high caliber, talented team needed to achieve the UF’s ambitious goals. We plan to take into account market rates for an individual’s role and experience while putting together comp packages.

Yes! Most of the information on Waves is located in our Notion page. With more resources and a larger team, we will be able to to build a more robust website including a UGP Dashboard, and to make more frequent and detailed social media updates including grantee highlights and program updates.

We have published regular updates on Grants Waves from the @uniswapgrants Twitter account account in the past. However we are excited to do much more to keep the community up to date on our work in the future. As for oversight, we look forward to receiving regular input and feedback from our Advisors, and of course from the community. We intend to regularly attend existing Community Calls and to plan our own regular events (online and IRL) to field questions and input from the community, and to keep our Twitter DMs open for 1:1 discussion. We will also get community approval via Snapshot poll for any grant over $2M.

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I love the idea behind the Uniswap Foundation. I think the Uniswap Grants Program had too broad of a mandate in that it helped fund things that were only tangentially related to the actual Uniswap protocol (i.e. DeFi Education Fund).

I think we desperately need something that focuses solely on improving the Uniswap protocol and ecosystem specifically. It will help make the Uniswap ecosystem less forkable in my opinion.

I’ll let the others who are more knowledgeable debate the numbers, but I love the idea of funding things directly related to the Uniswap protocol.

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The creation of the Uniswap Foundation is the natural progression of 1) further decentralization of the protocol and 2) formalization of an effective grant issuing entity to benefit the community.

DAO treasuries should not sit idle in a native token balance. The development of professional foundation to put assets to work to improve the experience and grow the user base is essential to the long term future of Uniswap.

Uniswap is the most profound and innovative financial application of our lifetime! Now is the time to grow the ecosystem with more tooling, interfaces, and easy to manage documentation so we can onboard the next billion people into DeFi.

As a supporter of Ethereum (former Head of Growth, EEA) and long time Uniswap LP, I support @devinwalsh and @kenneth in this proposal.

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We support the proposal to form the Uniswap Foundation.

Having a foundation that has the necessary resources to attract top talent and build out a growing ecosystem of Uniswap products is key to the decentralization of the protocol and its continued growth.

We know Devin and the advisors/team members here, and believe they are the right people to take this initiative forward.

This is a step that aligns with our Delegation Platform pitch and is a good next step in UNI token holders becoming more active in the ecosystem. It will take a lot of work and motivated UNI holders/delegates to make the best of these resources and we are excited to contribute.

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Thanks @BP333, we’re very excited about the Foundation as well, and think there is a huge opportunity for it to support the Uniswap protocol and broader ecosystem!

As a small note, I do want to clear up the point about the Defi Education Fund (DEF). The Uniswap Grants Program did not fund the DEF, it went through the Uniswap community governance process. Final governance vote is here: Uniswap Interface

Thank you so much for your support and we’re excited to work with you and others in the community if the final vote for the UF passes.

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The ask is $14M to manage $60m over 3 years.

19% of total funds going toward management over 3 years.

VCs charge 2%/year management fees (6% for 3 years).

Why does UF need to charge a higher percent for capital management than VCs do?

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nice piece, putting it the way they are, please drop more to educate who wants to learn

You can’t compare a Foundation with VCs, it’s just not the same type and amount of work.

The UF, if I understood this post correctly, will help steward the Uniswap Protocol with monetary and non-monetary support to whoever may need it as well as identify other areas with potential and make recommendations. All of that without necessarily taking a stake in those investments.

Thanks Brenner. @enti is correct. The Uniswap Foundation would not be a venture fund. It will be focused on not only building a best-in-class grant making organization (not taking an equity stake in the projects it supports) but also on reinvigorating the Uniswap governance process and building, supporting and maintaining the ecosystem and protocol to be sustainable and successful for the long term.

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That’s a notable difference, thank you @enti for calling that out.

I don’t know much about what a typical Foundation’s operating expenses are relative to the amount of capital they’re overseeing, but would be curious to see the comparisons (I do understand there would be differences)

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Heya @Brenner sharing a perspective -

1. The Foundation does more than just disburse grants
Looking at the jobs posted, there are also roles involved that do not only manage the ‘fund’ such as governance, community, devrel.

About 3 roles (1/4) are directly managing the grants disbursement which if we simply take that as a guidance would be about $3.5M of the operating budget. 6% of $60M is $3.6M.

As @devinwalsh pointed out in this reply here, there’s a lot more than goes on in a Foundation than just disbursing grants.

2. The pay is reasonable when looking at existing nonprofits
Just very quickly, searching up a report on salaries for nonprofits - the level of pay for a disbursement > $50M is about 280k annually for VP-level staff. 280k * 12 staff * 3 years leads us to $10.08M. The budget allocated for salaries is $10.3M which is very close. Considering that running a foundation in Web3 requires specialised skillsets, I’d say that the foundation could definitely afford to pay more.

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Hey @Brenner - great to see you here!

One quick bit of additional context that I’ll surface here - VCs also see personal upside from their deployment of capital through carry. This usually serves as a significant source of compensation, in addition to the management fee.

Uniswap Foundation members wouldn’t have access to this - as they deploy non-dilutive capital to projects in the ecosystem. In order to make sure that the Foundation is able to retain specialized talent and isn’t plagued by the turnover and instability other projects in the space are facing, $10.3M for 12 staff over 3 years is very reasonable. In fact - it’s not uncommon for other projects in the space to allocate more to their founding team members.

Also, as @Fishbiscuit mentioned, the roles UF is hiring for aren’t all in capital deployment - with roles in governance, community, partnerships, and devrel.

Considering Uniswap’s position in the ecosystem and the sheer extensibility of a DEX, the Uniswap Foundation has an incredible opportunity to drive decentralized growth, advocate for the protocol, and reinvigorate governance - creating massive additional value for all of Uniswap’s stakeholders in the process. The sky is truly the limit when it comes to Uniswap’s future.

That being said - I fully trust @devinwalsh
and @kenneth that these 12 roles will help the Uniswap Foundation propel the Uniswap ecosystem forward. Thank you both for the months of intentionality and preparation that came before this proposal. It was a joy to read and I’m excited to share my support for the Uniswap Foundation.

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What if the biannual report turns into a trimestral report? For me it would provide more expectative allignment with the community.

Let me divague here and suppose that UF won’t deliver any of those OKRs…
Does the protocol would suffer any kind of impact?
I mean, 74M doesn’t seem to be an expressive amount of capital to Uniswap.

Wouldthe protocol losses its credibility with the community if something like that happen? And if it’s yes, why would it lose if UF have nothing to do with Uni Labs?

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